


in the celestial vaults / i drew bedraggled breaths

by cartoonmoomba



Category: Final Fantasy XIII Series, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: a super drabble has appeared, it is full of vagueness and abstract things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:05:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartoonmoomba/pseuds/cartoonmoomba
Summary: Then the good lord said, let there be blood...This is how all things start: with the genocide of the unfaithful. [Bhuni!Hope]





	in the celestial vaults / i drew bedraggled breaths

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Title credited to Florence + The Machine. Majority of dialogue comes directly from, and inspired me, Keaton St. James' 'Light'.

.

He awakens in the New World and he is raw, unsettled. Is he a dream – a memory? Is he once again man, or once again boy? Has he been left mortal or with divinity still wreaking havoc inside his body?

Is he a saviour, the personification of hope, tangible and warm; is he the isolated instigator of doomsday, in his crumbling moon up high?

Hope flexes his fingers – he closes his eyes against the brightness of the sun streaming through the windows. He inhales, does not exhale. A bed, a room – his own. Photos on the wall of a life both lived and not. _Is this a lie_? He thinks. _Is this a dream?_ _Is this where well-meaning men go to die?_

Tender and kind, in the absolute, sudden silence of his world, a voice in his head croons:

_“We will grow into our skins like kings grow into their kingdoms.”_

_We,_ he muses on the term. A smile breaks apart the harsh lines of his mouth. One hand over his eyes, lashes so soft against skin he hasn’t felt in eternity, he gazes upon the plaster ceiling up above. _Kings do not grow into anything_ , he tells it. _Kings are born rulers, and divine right takes its course._

.

.

He finds Vanille in a garden overlooking the ocean. She sits surrounded by roses, her fingers running over the petals and humming under her breath. The garden stands empty: the students are busy with end of term tasks. “What does forgiveness mean?” He asks of her, bathed in sunlight side-by-side. The early summer sun warms the backs of their necks, the clothes over their shoulders.

She does not reply. “All the hymns are truly warsongs,” is what she finally says, after long minutes pass in silence. She smudges the blood on her fingers from where she’s been carelessly handling the stems, the thorns piercing into her calloused hands. “This is why we have teeth,” she smiles at him, then, not at all happily, and Hope knows there will be no forgiveness of the kind he seeks:

Absolute, benevolent, and wholly –

Of himself.

.

.

 _“It’s beautiful, the way you reclaim your heart from its ashes,”_ a dead god tells him in a nightmare, drifting in an ocean of galaxies and dying stars. _Will you rise again?_ Hope can hear the question not voiced, and the mortal and the divine watch destruction be brilliantly forced into rebirth.

.

.

“Everyone you touch burns like a blue star.”

Yeul is no longer extraordinary or cursed but just as god-touched as he. She says, in-between the lines he can read as easily as the textbooks he assigns to his class: _your love is the kind which destroys_ and Hope remembers his mother and Lightning and Serah and then the entire world seen from the shell of planet he bloodied himself to hang in the sky—

.

.

 _You are a song, a symphony in progress_ he writes in a letter that he never finishes, never sends, to a woman he is too frightened to see.

.

.

“ _The holiest truth of them all_ ,” he writes on the board, the eyes of three hundred students burning their heat into his back, “ _is hunger_.”

And _oh,_ how he does indeed hunger – he seeks an answer to a problem he cannot discern, and how his body aches aches _aches_ in want of—

.

.

“I have loved you shamelessly since before you were stardust," he imagines himself professing, and in his dreams he laughs because the memories not his own can recall such a time of pre-creation.

.

.

.

.

_Then the good lord said, let there be blood._

This is how all things start: with the genocide of the unfaithful.

It is brilliant. It is ruthless.

It is rebirth.

.

.

Bhunivelze proclaims: “ _Our bellies ache for the sharp, sun-shaped taste of the divine.”_ And then he laughs a horrible sound, for he is divine.

 _They_ are divine.

.

.

The goddess before him mocks his words, even as destroyed as she is. “ _There is no reason to be afraid of what comes next._ ” Scoffing, her eyes find his from the pale hollows of her face. “There are all the reasons to be afraid, Hope.”

.

.

“Is it not beautiful?” He asks his love, his mother-daughter-wife, and the goddess turns away from the world he has wrought.


End file.
